Every so often, a person with a security detail, a compensation committee and five admins emerges to tell the rest of us that the top job is actually fairly straightforward. This week’s entry is Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who told The Verge Tuesday (May 26) that “the CEO job is not that complicated,” a line Fast Company treated as both a provocation and a leadership Rorschach test. Pichai’s point was not quite that any sentient spreadsheet could run Google. It was that artificial intelligence may help CEOs make more rational decisions, and that “very, very few decisions” are genuinely consequential, as Pichai said. The real job is to decide, keep velocity high and keep the company moving, he said in the report. Somewhere, 40,000 vice presidents of alignment just felt a chill. To be fair, Pichai is not the first titan to imply that the CEO job boils down to decision quality and tempo. Amazon Founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos has been saying a version of this for years, only with more Day 1 thunder. In Amazon’s 2016 shareholder letter, Bezos said great companies make “high-quality, high-velocity decisions,” and he famously divided decisions into two types: reversible doors and one-way doors. In a Fast Company excerpt, Bezos put it even more plainly. Senior executives are paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions, not thousands of them. This is comforting until you remember that one of those decisions might involve buying a grocery chain, launching a…
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